The Cold War (Russian: холо́дная война́, kholodnaya voĭna) was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States and its NATO allies. Both sides possessed nuclear weapons, and because their use would probably guarantee their mutual assured destruction the chief military forces never engaged in a major battle with each other. The nuclear deterrent kept the war 'cold.' The conflict was expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The antagonistic behaviour that both sides displayed towards their enemy resulted in many crises which risked mutual annihilation in a nuclear exchange. To alleviate thie risk of nuclear war exacerbated by accident or mistake, both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack.The Cold War began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, as the USSR and the US saw each other as mutual superpowers with profound economic and political differences. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing part or all of some and maintaining others as satellite states. The post-war recovery of Western Europe was facilitated by the United States' Marshall Plan, while the Soviet Union, wary of the conditions attached, declined to participate and prompted its satellite states to do likewise. An alternative, COMECON, was set up by the Soviets instead. The United States forged NATO, a military alliance using containment of communism as a main strategy (Truman Doctrine), in 1949, while the Soviet bloc formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and others chose to stay neutral with the Non-Aligned Movement. Elsewhere, the US and USSR fought proxy wars of various types: in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR assisted and helped foster communist revolutions, opposed by several Western countries and their regional allies; some they attempted to roll back, with mixed results.
The Cold War featured cycles of relative calm and of high tension. The most tense involved the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. In the 1980s, under the Reagan Doctrine, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the nation was already suffering economic stagnation. In the late 1980s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). The Cold War ended after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power. The Cold War and its events have had a significant impact on the world today, and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare.
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